Alexander Fleming was a brilliant biologist, but his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in 1928 looked like a chaotic student dorm. He hated cleaning up, preferring to move from one experiment to the next while leaving his equipment piled high.
In August, he decided he needed a vacation. Instead of properly cleaning his workspace or putting his research away, he simply stacked a dozen glass petri dishes containing deadly staphylococcus bacteria in a corner of his bench, locked the door, and left for two weeks.
While he was away, a cold spell hit London, followed by a sudden heatwave.
When Fleming returned, he sat down at his messy desk and picked up the stack of dirty dishes to finally wash them. He stopped. On one of the plates, a stray mold spore from a lab downstairs had drifted through the air and landed on the bacteria. Around the patch of mold, the deadly bacteria had completely dissolved into clear fluid.
Instead of scrubbing the dish clean and ignoring it, Fleming studied it. That unwashed plate led to the discovery of penicillin, the world’s first true antibiotic, which went on to save over 200 million lives—all because a guy didn’t want to do the dishes before going on holiday.
